Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king-Chapter 1075: Enemy(2)

Two and a half weeks had passed since the League’s host had first coiled around the Bastion, worming itself and cutting off any link the force inside may have had with their prince. .

For the defenders, it was a pleasingly boring time, at least so it was for those without a bow or a sling in hand, all they did was wait, while of course sharpening blades and watching the horizon all they wished musing about what shapes the clouds had.

But for the men of the hour?A great deal of work they had, for it was theirs task to bid welcome to every soul that dared approach the ditch with a barrow of dirt.

There were many who were owed such a greeting , and the Bastion’s stores of ash-wood and lead were more than sufficient to go around.

A few days prior, once the ditch had been choked with enough earth and corpses to allow a footing, the League’s commanders had seen fit in their collective wisdom to launch a hasty, pride-driven assault on the southern stronghold, just one , perhaps to see if the wall were firm.

It was night when they did. And it must have been such a scary thing, to die alone in the dark.

They had come with nothing but ladders and a desperate, misguided fervor. Most had died before the first rung even touched the stone, their bodies piling up in the very ditch they had just spent a fortnight filling.

The message seemed to have been heeded at last. The reckless lunges had ceased at the first attack, replaced by the slow, methodical industry of a proper siege.

Now, through the morning haze, the shapes of the League’s real intentions were becoming clear. Great skeletal frames of timber were rising in the distance, siege towers, massive and lumbering, designed to bring the fight level with the battlements.

Further back, the heavy rhythmic thud of hammers spoke of rams being iron-capped to batter the gates.

Asag stood on the eastern wall, his eyes fixed on one tower in particular that was nearing completion. He had half a mind to lead a quick sortie, a dash through the postern gate to put the structure to the torch. The thought of watching a week’s worth of their sweat and timber go up in a roar of orange flame made his lips twitch toward a smile.

But Asag’s smile was not a thing of song.

Whenever the impulse took him, the puckered scar tissue on the left side of his face pulled taut, twisting his features.

He could see the subtle flinch in the eyes of the younger levies whenever he looked their way. There were only a handful of men,who didn’t look at his face as if it were a warning. For those men, Asag would have gladly taken an arrow to the heart. For the rest, he remained a gargoyle.

He ultimately pushed the thought of a sortie aside. Without horsemen for a lightning strike, a foot-raid was too great a gamble. He didn’t trust the undisciplined levies of the minor lords to heed the retreat. They were the sort of fools who, once the tower was lit, would wander deeper into the enemy camp in search of a silver cup or a stray ham, only to be cut down in the dark when the enemy regrouped.

So, he remained on the stone, observing the inevitable coming his way.

On the rise of the thirteenth morning, the rays finally came up to reveal the League in full array.

As the sun climbed higher, the light caught the forest of spearpoints stretching across the valley. From the battlements, all could see the thousands of steel tips shimmering under the morning rays, looking like countless cold stars fallen upon a vast field of green, one that Asag knew would be stained a deep dew-thick red before the sun set.

Then, the horns of the League began to blow, a deep, mournful lowing that echoed off and seemed to resonate into the very stone they were standing upon. 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

Without fanfare or further posturing, the enemy lines began to ripple. It was a strange, hypnotic sight from the heights: the "stars" of the spear-tips remained eerily steady while the mass of men beneath them surged forward like a rising tide.

The air, once filled only with the whistle of the wind, was suddenly dominated by a rhythmic, bone-shaking vibration.

Dum. Dum. Dum. Dum.

Some thousand boots met the earth in a synchronized cadence that seemed to pulse through the very stone of the battlements. There were twelve thousands of men outside, but not all could be made to charge.

But that was no matter, the sight of them was already enough to rattle hearts.

"Here! Over here, you little rat!" a bowman barked, waving a calloused hand at a page. The boy, lungs burning and face flushed a deep scarlet, was sprinting along the walkway cradling a small barrel of bodkin-tipped arrows as if it were a holy relic.

"Bastards couldn’t even wait for the sky to dim," a man nearby grumbled. He wore a dented breastplate that marked him as a man of some means, perhaps a knight who had lost his horse, or a wealthy freeholder who had spent his life’s savings on steel to avoid a peasant’s death. He flipped up his visor, gasping as the weak morning breeze kissed his sweaty face. "I’m fucking drowning in this thing."

Asag moved past them, his boots ringing heavy on the stone. He stopped near a knot of levies wearing the colors of Lord Masio. They were Herculeans.

"Aye," one of them muttered, leaning on a spear that looked older than he was. "They’ll think us flour from all this baking. The sun’s barely up and I’m already roasted."

"I was pulled from the field before I could even touch the harvest," another whispered, his voice thick with a bitter,provincial Herculeian accent. "I just hope my sister has the strength to bring the grain in. If these cunts burn the valley north, we’ll be eating dirt by October."

"Don’t speak of it," a third man hissed, crossing himself. "I lost a cousin to the Great Hunger. Two winters before the Dog Prince fell, I remember it well. Horrible time to be alive that one we fed on grass and rats...I heard some villages even ate their own deads passing them around like cows.As if those were not the first to have been butchered."

"Shush,No more of that." the first one warned, glancing at Asag. "The Prince is the old one. We have a new one now.And Five grace him, ain’t it right?"

Asag lingered for a moment, listening to the low rumble of their voices. Nearly a quarter of their host was made of Herculean blood, men who were seeing their first real war under Alpheo’s banner.

During the Romelian campaign, they had been left behind; they after all were going as a simple allied force, they had brought some two-thousand troops in excepting just to be a supporting army.

Of course that was proven wrong later, but then they believed it so.

Then there was the invasion he led to Oizen, though the prince had deemed the Herculeians still too battered from the famine to bring meaningful help.

A famine that the prince himself had caused.

It was a sound enough strategy when the land was not theirs.

By choking the grain supplies, Alpheo had turned the Herculean lords into beggars and their peasants into ghosts, shattering the logistics of the old regime.But then the land became theirs and luckily the Fox was as quick to heal as he was to harm. Once the land was his, the gifts of seed-grain had flowed from the capital, and tax exemptions had been given to coax life back into the soil.

Now with the restoration of the land had brought a dual harvest to Yarzat: one of grain and one of steel.

He did not know if the prince was playing some long game or it was him overthing it, but it seemed to him that while Yarzat was being groomed as a center for high-value trade and "coin-crops," Herculia had been painstakingly rebuilt to be the kingdom’s food-basket.

The Prince’s harvest to be used to war had increased by half with the Herculeians bending to him.

Under any other banner, maintaining nearly 4,500 men in the field, with 3,200 packed into the Bastion alone, would have been a logistical suicide.

Yet, Alpheo could count on the Romelian Emperor support even before the first League banner was even stitched. He had personally brokered contracts with the Romelian trade guilds with of course the intercession of the Imperial crown, racking up stores of grain and salt that filled the Bastion’s deep cellars to the vaulted ceilings.

Asag, however, spared little thought for the intricacies of such a thing, for were the province of the Fox’s restless mind. Asag’s vocation was far simpler, far older, and far more honest.

Killed everything that was on sight.

He felt the vibration of the wall increase as the enemy’s siege engines reached the killing ground. The rhythmic twang-thrum of the Yarzat longbows releasing their energy became a continuous drone, punctuated by the terrifying, high-pitched shrill of slung stones cutting through the air. Below, the first line of the League’s infantry began to scream as the "stars" of their spear-tips were eclipsed by a rain of bodkin points.

With such sight Asag reached up, his fingers catching the edge of his visor. He took one last look at the horizon, at the sprawling, arrogant host that thought they could starve out a man who had mastered the art of hunger.

And finally he brought the visor down.

It was sunny and hot, the Bastion was his to defend, the prince’s hope laid on him, and he had an army to face.